A cookbook full of wonderful recipes and ideas drawn from throughout the Christian tradition, with suggestions about when, and why, these dishes might be served. It contains more than 275 recipes with which to celebrate all the holidays throughout the Christian year, as well as the many shared rituals that strengthen family bonds and enrich the significance of the day to day events of our lives. How these rituals, rites and feasts came about, how they are celebrated around the world, and how you can bring them into your home are described every step of the way. Includes wonderful illustrations.

"A Continual Feast" brings new meaning to "breaking bread together." A book to cook from and learn from, it includes: menus for holidays and every day recipes for all occasions from church picnics and Sunday suppers to birthdays, namedays, confirmations, and baptisms; wonderful cooking projects for children; recipes for Christmas giving; thoughtful suggestions on taking food to others; customs associated with many great Christian holidays from Advent through Pentecost as well as various saints days around the world; traditional meanings associated with particular foods; tips on fasting and abstinence; recipes that incorporate leftovers; quotations from the Bible and various theological and gastronomic sources; many recipes of varied ethnic origins; a wealth of Christian history and thought.

Insights into power, spectacle, and performance in the courts of Middle Eastern rulers In recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have received much less attention, particularly for courts before 1500AD. In the Presence of Power, however, sheds new light on courtly life across the region. This insightful, exploratory collection of essays uncovers surprising commonalities across a broad swath of cultures. The pre-modern period in this volume includes roughly seven centuries, opening with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, whose reign marked an important watershed for Late Antique culture, and closing with the rule of the so-called "gunpowder" empires of the Ottomans and Safavids over much of the Near East in the sixteenth century. In between, this volume locates similarities across the Western Medieval, Byzantine and Islamicate courtly cultures, spanning a vast history and geography to demonstrate the important cross-pollinations that occurred between their literary and cultural legacies. This study does not presume the presence of one shared courtly institution across time and space, but rather seeks to understand the different ways in which contemporaries experienced and spoke about these places of power and performance. Adopting a very broad view of performances, In the Presence of Power includes exuberant expressions of love in Arabic stories, shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo, Byzantine storytelling, religious food traditions in Christian Cyprus, advice, and political and ethnographic performances of power.

This is a very interesting collection of topics that centers on critical methodologies and the central problems of medieval alterity.

The question of what medieval "courtliness" was, both as a literary influence and as a historical "reality", is debated in this volume. The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and aliterary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore the witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval "courtliness" is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field. DANIEL E O'SULLIVAN is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi; LAURIE SHEPHARD is Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Contributors: Peter Haidu, Donald Maddox, Michel-Andre Bossy, Kristin Burr, Joan Tasker Grimbert, David Hult, Virgine Greene, Logan Whalen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Elizabeth W. Poe, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, William Schenck, Nadia Margolis, Laine Doggett, E. Jane Burns, Nancy FreemanRegalado, Laurie Shephard, Sarah White

Discussion of the importance of oral and performance traditions in the history of early Frence romance. This book proposes a fundamental revision of the history of early French romance, arguing that oral and performed traditions were far more important in the development of romance than scholars have recognised. It begins by dealingwith issues of orality and literacy, and argues that the form in which romances were composed was not the invention of clerics but was, rather, an oral form. It shows how early versions of the Tristan story, by Beroul, Thomas andMarie de France, express the complex interplay between oral and written traditions, then goes on to focus in greater depth on Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Chretien and the anonymous author of the Roman de Thebes. The second part of the book looks at performance, showing that romances such as those of Chretien invited voiced presentation; moreover, they were frequently recitd from memory, sung, and acted out in "dramatic" fashion. Romances can, and should, still be performed today. EVELYN BIRGE VITZ is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University.

Broad and wide-ranging survey of and investigation into the important question of whether medieval narrative was designed for performance. This book provides the first comprehensive study of the performance of medieval narrative, using examples from England and the Continent and a variety of genres to examine the crucial question of whether - and how - medieval narratives were indeed intended for performance. Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy between oral and written literature, the various contributions emphasize the range and power of medieval performance traditions, and demonstrate thatknowledge of the modes and means of performance is crucial for appreciating medieval narratives. The book is divided into four main parts, with each essay engaging with a specific issue or work, relating it to larger questions about performance. It first focuses on representations of the art of medieval performers of narrative. It then examines relationships between narrative performances and the material books that inspired, recorded, or representedthem. The next section studies performance features inscribed in texts and the significance of considering performability. The volume concludes with contributions by present-day professional performers who bring medieval narratives to life for contemporary audiences. Topics covered include orality, performance, storytelling, music, drama, the material book, public reading, and court life.

A celebration of the groundbreaking achievements of Nancy Freeman Regalado in the field of medieval French literature. This collection of essays pays tribute to Nancy Freeman Regalado, a ground-breaking scholar in the field of medieval French literature whose research has always pushed beyond disciplinary boundaries. The articles in the volume reflect the depth and diversity of her scholarship, as well as her collaborations with literary critics, philologists, historians, art historians, musicologists, and vocalists - in France, England, and the United States. Inspired byher most recent work, these twenty-four essays are tied together by a single question, rich in ramifications: how does performance shape our understanding of medieval and pre-modern literature and culture, whether the nature of that performance is visual, linguistic, theatrical, musical, religious, didactic, socio-political, or editorial? The studies presented here invite us to look afresh at the interrelationship of audience, author, text, and artifact, to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the creation, transmission, and reception of medieval literature, music, and art. EGLAL DOSS-QUINBY is Professor of French at Smith College; ROBERTA L. KRUEGER is Professor of Frenchat Hamilton College; E. JANE BURNS is Professor of Women's Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Contributors: ANNE AZEMA, RENATE BLUMENFELD-KOSINSKI, CYNTHIA J. BROWN, ELIZABETH A. R. BROWN, MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER, E. JANE BURNS, ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, KIMBERLEE CAMPBELL, ROBERT L. A. CLARK, MARK CRUSE, KATHRYN A. DUYS, ELIZABETH EMERY, SYLVIA HUOT, MARILYN LAWRENCE, KATHLEEN A. LOYSEN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, EDWARD H. ROESNER, SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG, LUCY FREEMAN SANDLER, PAMELA SHEINGORN, HELEN SOLTERER, JANE H. M. TAYLOR, EVELYN BIRGE VITZ, LORI J. WALTERS, AND MICHEL ZINK.

Insights into power, spectacle, and performance in the courts of Middle Eastern rulers In recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have received much less attention, particularly for courts before 1500AD. In the Presence of Power, however, sheds new light on courtly life across the region. This insightful, exploratory collection of essays uncovers surprising commonalities across a broad swath of cultures. The pre-modern period in this volume includes roughly seven centuries, opening with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, whose reign marked an important watershed for Late Antique culture, and closing with the rule of the so-called "gunpowder" empires of the Ottomans and Safavids over much of the Near East in the sixteenth century. In between, this volume locates similarities across the Western Medieval, Byzantine and Islamicate courtly cultures, spanning a vast history and geography to demonstrate the important cross-pollinations that occurred between their literary and cultural legacies. This study does not presume the presence of one shared courtly institution across time and space, but rather seeks to understand the different ways in which contemporaries experienced and spoke about these places of power and performance. Adopting a very broad view of performances, In the Presence of Power includes exuberant expressions of love in Arabic stories, shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo, Byzantine storytelling, religious food traditions in Christian Cyprus, advice, and political and ethnographic performances of power.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world. The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of 'performance' and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.